Titling an interview with Tom and Renee Pastoor “New in Town” is what those in the writing business would call irony, given their thirty one years of residence in the neighborhood. But that is where they took me, to a time when they were new in town.

“We bought the house dirt cheap. We met Ray and Isabell Squires, who were our neighbors and really, kind of second grandparents to our children.”

We quickly had to pause our interview for the welcome interuption of neighborhood kids wanting to talk to Tom. Here is a scene and a continuation of the investment in the lives his neighbor’s children. And here, in a way, is Ray, who had done the same.

“So Ray and Isabell were like grandparents to our kids. They took care of them while we were doing projects around the house. I learned a lot from Ray. He helped me do some roofing on the garage. He was in his mid-seventies, and he carried the rolled roofing, on his shoulder, up the ladder, to show me how to do it. I learned a lot from him about being resourceful and being a gardener. He had the most beautiful garden. Basically, we’ve inherited his garden. He graduated from Michigan College, before it was Michigan State, and had a degree in horticulture and animal husbandry.”

Renee gave me a tour of their backyard, and the garden that Ray planted, and she and Tom had improved on. It’s incredibly beautiful, almost magical to someone whose imagination tends to carry him away.

“When Ray was a little boy, he had hearing loss. Six or seven years old. When he got old, he related to me how difficult that was, to be a boy and not be able to hear. He got pretty emotional about it, and Ray was a pretty tough guy. He was one of the original garden boys. There was a guy named McLouth that had a garden out by Mona Lake, by the Henry Street float bridge. And these kids from the neighborhood would go there and learn about gardening. I think it’s pretty fitting that we’re doing the same thing right across the street from his house.”

In the park, across the street from his house, Tom teaches the neighborhood kids about gardening. I’m beginning to think everyone in the neighborhood is a gardener. I had no idea when I got involved with McLaughlin that it’s agricultural roots ran so deep.

And in coming full circle, the kids painted a mural on the fence in the new park, right behind the garden where Tom works with them. And on that mural, they painted Ray’s old house.

We grow up in our imperfect worlds, and they make us who we are. We learn our limits, and we know that we can’t fix the world, but we try. We try to fix the things that hurts us.

I sat in a little bistro on 3rd street called Mia & Grace, talking with Carlos Avrard, fellow Mosaic Way-er and coordinator of the Healthy Neighborhood Project in McLaughlin.

“They have muffalettas here,” he said as he explained the place.

I set out my digital recorder and give him a simple directive: get me to now.

He told me fondly about New Orleans – the food, the music, the weather, the drive-thru alcohol stands – the diversity he encountered on every side.

“We moved a lot, though, around,” he said. He went to eight different schools in his thirteen years, never setting down any roots. Then he tells me in a quiet sort of way that he’s envious of people who have long-term friendships, the kind that stretch back into childhood.

He met his wife, Sarah, in college. They hung out in a Hardee’s one of the first nights he was there. “She knew right away,” he said. After graduation, they moved to Michigan. The church they attended was located in McLaughlin at the time. Starting Mosaic Way has seen them come full circle.

“The diversity, that’s a good, healthy thing, that there’s not people who look like you and think like you. There’s a vibrancy in that,” he said of the mosaic McLaughlin neighborhood.

We arrived at now, so now what? These days Carlos is remodeling his house and continuing his work with the neighborhood.

“One cool thing about our home remodel project – where we’re taking this home built over a hundred years ago and it’s sturdy and it has all this character to it, but has all this work that’s required – I’m kinda paralleling this home remodel project to this neighborhood. Where as we’re spending ourselves and putting in effort and money into restoring this home in a way, of pouring passion and energy – and granted, it’s one little piece of this neighborhood, but paralleling that to this community, putting in effort, putting in time, pouring ourselves and our passions toward seeing this community be restored in a way. And I think those two parallels of the struggles that we deal with on the house, of knowing it’s not a quick fix and it’s not gonna be easy and we’re gonna have to be patient; we’re gonna have frustrations and roadblocks. The same is true for this neighborhood, that it’s not going to be a quick fix; we’re gonna have to deal with the frustration and the roadblocks and all those things. As you kinda dig into this stuff you find that you bust open a wall, and you find out what the plumbing and electrical is like below it. Whereas, you knock on a door, you find a neighbor that has issues or something… So that’s been an interesting thing that’s been echoing in my head a lot that this house remodel project in a nutshell is kind of symbolic in a way of this neighborhood. You know we can’t do this house remodeling on our own; we can’t have this neighborhood redo itself on its own. It requires other people. Community and folks for support and all those things.”